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June 7 - June 20, 2023
According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.
said Rincewind, with the expression of one who knows that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
Wizards had always known that the act of observation changed the thing that was observed, and sometimes forgot that it also changed the observer, too.
But he hadn’t been frightened, because he didn’t have the imagination.
“It’s most fascinating,” said the Bursar, who was on the median part of his mental cycle and therefore vaguely on the right planet even if insulated from it by five miles of mental cotton wool.
Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it was something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep, and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.
The root problem, Rincewind had come to believe, was that he suffered from pre-emptive karma. If it even looked as though something nice was going to happen to him in the near future, something bad would happen right now. And it went on happening to him right through the part where the good stuff should be happening, so that he never actually experienced it. It was as if he always got the indigestion before the meal and felt so dreadful that he never actually managed to eat anything.
He’d really liked that island. He’d enjoyed Coconut Surprise. You cracked it open and, hey, there was coconut inside. That was the kind of surprise he liked.
He was no good at anything else. Wizardry was the only refuge. Well, actually he was no good at wizardry either, but at least he was definitively no good at it. He’d always felt he had a right to exist as a wizard in the same way that you couldn’t do proper maths without the number 0, which wasn’t a number at all but, if it went away, would leave a lot of larger numbers looking bloody stupid.
Rincewind had faced many horrors in his time, but none held quite the same place in the lexicon of dread as those few seconds after someone said, “Turn over your papers now.”
“Hit a man too hard and you can only rob him once; “Hit him just hard enough and you can rob him every week.”
“All the peasants believe in the imminent arrival of the Great Wizard,” she said. “But, in the words of the great philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, ‘When many expect a mighty stallion they will find hooves on an ant.’”
But Ly Tin Wheedle says an ass may do the work of an ox in a time of no horses. One of his less convincing aphorisms, I’ve always thought.”
“Never a good idea to give a monkey the key to a banana plantation,”
When people who can read and write start fighting on behalf of people who can’t, you just end up with another kind of stupidity. If you want to help them, build a big library or something somewhere and leave the door open.
The Empire’s got something worse than whips all right. It’s got obedience. Whips in the soul. They obey anyone who tells them what to do. Freedom just means being told what to do by someone different.
“Let me see, now,” he thought. “Jade Fan being pursued over a bridge by man waving his arms and screaming, ‘Get out of the way!’ followed by man with prod, three guards, five laundry men, and a wrestler unable to stop.” He had to simplify it a bit, of course.
His gaze swept the kitchens. It was certainly the only housework that he had ever done.
“Barbarism? Hah! When we kills people we do it there and then, lookin’ ’em in the eye, and we’d be happy to buy ’em a drink in the next world, no harm done. I never knew a barbarian who cut up people slowly in little rooms, or tortured women to make ’em look pretty, or put poison in people’s grub. Civilization? If that’s civilization, you can shove it where the sun don’t shine!”
The Four Horsemen whose Ride presages the end of the world are known to be Death, War, Famine, and Pestilence. But even less significant events have their own Horsemen. For example, the Four Horsemen of the Common Cold are Sniffles, Chesty, Nostril, and Lack of Tissues; the Four Horsemen whose appearance foreshadows any public holiday are Storm, Gales, Sleet, and Contra-flow.
“I never sacrifice a pawn,” said the Lady. “How can you hope to win without sacrificing the occasional pawn?” “Oh, I never play to win.” She smiled. “But I do play not to lose. Watch…”
Even Hex didn’t know what it could do. But it was going to find out. The quill pen scritched and blotted its way over a fresh sheet of paper and drew, for no good reason, a calendar for the year surmounted by a rather angular picture of a beagle, standing on its hind legs.
